"She is very ill, Geoffrey," Annie went on; "very weak and worn, and weary of life. I am constantly with her, but sometimes she is unable or unwilling to speak to me. She is gloomy and reserved, and suffers as much in mind as in body, I am sure."
Geoffrey said slowly, "Does she ever speak to you of me?"
Annie replied, "Not often. When she does, it is always with the greatest sorrow for your sorrow, and the deepest sense of the injury she has done you. I am going to her to-day, Geoffrey, and I should like to take to her an assurance of your forgiveness. May I tell Margaret that you forgive her?"
He turned hastily, and said with a great gasp, "O Annie, tell her that I love her!"
"I will tell her that," the girl said gently and sadly, and an expression of pain crossed her face. She thought of the love that had been wasted, and the life that had been blighted.
"What is she going to do?" asked Geoffrey; "how is it to be in the future?" This was a difficult question for Annie to answer: she knew well what lay in the future; but she dreaded to tell Geoffrey, even while she felt that the wisest, the easiest, the best, and the most merciful solution of the terrible dilemma in which a woman's ungoverned passion had placed so many innocent persons was surely and not slowly approaching.
"I don't know, Geoffrey," she said; "I cannot tell you. Nothing can be decided upon until she is better, and you are well enough to advise and direct us. Try and rest satisfied for the present. She is safe, no harm can come to her; and I am able and willing to befriend her now as you did before. Take comfort, Geoffrey; it is all dreadful; but if we had not found her, how much worse it would have been!"
At this moment the nurse carried her charge out of their sight, as she came towards the house, and Annie, thinking of the more than motherless child, wondered at the no-meaning of her own words, and how any thing could have been worse than what had occurred.
She and Geoffrey had spoken very calmly to each other, and there had been no demonstration of gratitude to her on his part; but it would be impossible to tell the thankfulness which filled his heart. It was a feeling of respite which possessed him. The dreadful misfortune which had fallen upon him was as real and as great as ever; but he could rest from the thought of it, from its constant torture, now that he knew that she was safe from actual physical harm; now that no awful vision of a repetition of the destitution and misery from which he had once rescued her, could come to appal him. Like a man who, knowing that the morrow will bring him a laborious task to do, straining his powers to the utmost, inexorable and inevitable in its claims, covets the deep rest of the hours which intervene between the present and the hour which must summon him to his toil, Geoffrey, in the lassitude of recent illness, in the weakness of early convalescence, rested from the contemplation of his misery. He had taken Annie's communication very quietly; he had a sort of feeling that it ought to surprise him very much, that the circumstances were extraordinary, that the chain of events was a strangely-wrought one--but he felt little surprise; it was lurking somewhere in his mind, he would feel it all by and by, no doubt; but nothing beyond relief was very evident to him in his present state. He wondered, indeed, how it was with Annie herself; how the brave, devoted, and unselfish girl had been able, trammelled as she was by the rules and restrictions of a great house, to carry out her benevolent designs, and dispose of her own time after her own fashion. There was another part of the subject which Geoffrey did not approach even in his thoughts. Bowker had not told him of Margaret's entreaties that she might see Lionel Brakespere; he had not told him that the young man had returned to his father's house; and he made no reference to him in his consideration of Annie's position. He had no notion that the circumstances in which Lord Caterham had entreated his protection for Annie had already arisen.
"How is it that you can do all this unquestioned, Annie?" he asked; "how can you be so much away from home?"